Tuesday, December 9, 2014

"Tales within Tales" is a recent article on Pasolini, the Nights and postmodernism at Reorient, an online magazine. It is written by Masters student Sabrina Guerrieri and does a fine job at suggestively tying together notions of postmodernity with Pasolini's treatment of the Nights.

"Sometimes I ask myself (without the least anxiety) if by chance this
trilogy [to] which I am giving myself body and soul is not a form of
political disengagement and … indifference. But I know intimately that
my recent works are political precisely because they do not want to be
so … The interruption of meaning is not only more honest, it is more
universal than the meaning itself.

Such a statement suggests that Il Fiore, through the
interruption of meaning, is an attempt to bring Pasolini’s spectators to
a politico-cultural alertness. Identifying himself with those on the
margins of society, he sought stories that explored the non-normative —
those of characters such as queers, prostitutes, immigrants, and
peasants. Although the entire Trilogy of Life has been argued to be a celebration of pre-capitalist/non-industrialised societies, Il Fiore, in
particular, with its emphasis on the ‘non-West’, provided Pasolini with
a potential point of resistance to the cultural hegemony of the
economic centre. ‘My polemic was against the culture of the dominant
Eurocentric class’, Pasolini explicitly stated. He was well aware of the
fabrication of Orientalist
representations within the popular imaginary – that is, of the ‘East’
as a society still on the borders of consumer culture and not yet
homologated by the forces of neo-capitalism."